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7 For the phrase ‘multi-sited histories’ see Warwick Anderson, ‘Postcolonial histories of medicine’, in Frank Huisman and John Harley Warner (eds.), Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, 287.

8 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1993Google Scholar; Vaughan, Megan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991Google Scholar; Anderson, Warwick, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Prakash, Gyan, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999Google Scholar.

9 Pande, Ishita, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire, London and New York: Routledge, 2010Google Scholar.

10 Hodges, Sarah, ‘The global menace’, Social History of Medicine, forthcoming; Shruti Kapila, ‘The enchantment of science in India’, Isis (2010) 101, pp. 120–132Google Scholar; Sivasundaram, Sujit, ‘Sciences and the global: on methods, questions and theory’, Isis (2010) 101, pp. 146–158CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. See also Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, Empire, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 150–156Google Scholar.

11 Lisa Lowe, ‘The intimacy of four continents’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 191–212; Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 23–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 266.

12 Richard Drayton, ‘Maritime networks and the making of knowledge’, in David Cannadine (ed.), Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain's Maritime World, c.1763–c.1840, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 72–82.

13 Trentmann, Frank, ‘Materiality in the future of history: things, practices and politics’, Journal of British Studies (2009) 48, pp. 283–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 297–300; Kirsch, Scott and Mitchell, Don, ‘The nature of things: dead labor, nonhuman actors, and the persistence of Marxism’, Antipode (2004) 36, pp. 687–705CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 688; Pickering, Andrew, ‘The mangle of practice: agency and emergence in the sociology of science’, American Journal of Sociology (1993) 99, pp. 559–589CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 559–576.

14 Wim van Binsbergen, ‘Things, agency, and identities: introduction’, in Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere (eds.), Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities: The Social Life of Things Revisited, Berlin, Münster, Vienna and London: LIT Verlag, 2005, pp. 9–51; Thomas, Nicholas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991Google Scholar. For her explication of ‘materio-semiotic actors’ see Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, in Mario Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 172–188.

15 Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between metropole and colony’, op. cit. (3).

16 See especially Stoler, Ann Laura, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995Google Scholar; McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, London: Routledge, 1995Google Scholar; Burke, Timothy, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996Google Scholar.

17 On the theme of locality in science studies see Chambers, David Wade and Gillespie, Richard, ‘Locality in the history of science: colonial science, technoscience and indigenous knowledge’, Osiris (2000) 15, pp. 221–240CrossRefGoogle Scholar; For a recent summary see Raj, Kapil, ‘Introduction: circulation and locality in early modern science’, BJHS (2010) 43, pp. 513–517CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the politics of the vernacular in colonial medicine see Mukharji, Projit Bihari, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009Google Scholar.

18 For an analysis of recalcitrant ‘tactics’ of consumption see de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984Google Scholar.